Two stars. Rated PG-13, for action violence, dramatic intensity and brief profanity
By Derrick Bang
I’ve no idea why this series
continues to be popular; each entry is sillier than the one before.
Dan Brown may be able to maintain
reader credibility in a lengthy novel — Inferno
runs a self-indulgent 609 pages — but director Ron Howard’s film adaptations
are no more sensible than the old Perils
of Pauline silent movie serial.
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| A series of arcane, art-related clues eventually lead Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) and Dr. Sienna Brooks (Felicity Jones) to the fabled "death mask" of Italian poet Dante Alighieri. But what has this to do with a potential world-wide plague? And do we care? |
David Koepp’s screenplay for Inferno reduces the plot to little more
than a race-race-race against time,
occasionally alleviated when famed university symbologist Robert Langdon (Tom
Hanks) pauses for breath in order to solve another arcane riddle locked within
a famed piece of artwork.
On top of which, attempting to
make sense of the conspiracy-laden supporting characters is beyond the ability
of mere mortals. “Duplicitous” doesn’t begin to cover the crosses,
double-crosses and triple-crosses in this ludicrous plot, which quickly
devolves into a tiresome guessing game.
Lessee ... first they’re all bad
guys. Then some of the bad guys become good guys. Oh, wait, no; that one was
bad all along. And that one was good.
Until turning bad again.
All with poor Langdon caught in
the middle.
It quickly becomes impossible to
believe — or care about — any of these people. All we can do is wait for the
murk to clear, accompanied by tediously complicated explanations, so matters
can build to a staggeringly inept climax, and we can go home.
Brown may have sold all this meandering
nonsense to his readers — full disclosure prompts acknowledging that I’m not
among the faithful — but Koepp can’t begin to distill it into a two-hour film.
We can’t help wondering, as loyalties finally
become apparent in the third act, why Certain Parties didn’t simply ask for Langdon’s help, rather than
concocting such an elaborate means of “forcing” his assistance.
What makes Howard’s Dan Brown
adaptations even more exasperating is their insistence on taking such stuff and
nonsense so seriously. Robert
Langdon’s profession and expertise make him a close cousin to Harrison Ford’s
Indiana Jones, but director Steven Spielberg wisely turns those chapter-play
adventures into larkish thrill rides, with plenty of winking and nudging.
Brown’s style, on the other hand
— reproduced here by Howard and Koepp — always collapses under the weight of
its own pomposity.
So.
This new film opens on a lecture
hall presentation by billionaire geneticist Bertrand Zobrist (Ben Foster), who
warns that “zero hour” is fast approaching, with respect to world overpopulation.
With no end in sight to exponential birthrate, the result — human extinction —
is inevitable. Drastic action is necessary ... and Zobrist truly means drastic.
Elsewhere, Langdon shudders to
wakefulness in a hospital bed, clawing to consciousness past nightmares of hell
on Earth. His young doctor, Sienna Brooks (Felicity Jones), tells him to take
is easy; he has a head wound, and likely is suffering from a blend of confusion
and short-term amnesia. Langdon can’t even imagine why he’s in Florence; the
last thing he remembers is being on his own campus.
He doesn’t have long to ponder
such questions. Glancing through the open door into the hallway, he and Sienna
are horrified to see an assassin — dressed as a police Carabinieri — shooting
her way toward his room. The quick-witted Sienna yanks out Langdon’s various
tubes (ouch!), hauls his stumbling body in her wake, flees the hospital and
barely gets them to the safety of her nearby apartment.
Where we pause, as Langdon tries
to make sense of the situation. His bafflement intensifies when he finds, in a
jacket pocket — Sienna having grabbed his bag of clothes on the way out — a
small biohazard cylinder. Rather impulsively deciding to open it (not something I would do!), he discovers a medieval
“bone cylinder” reconfigured into a miniature projector.
The image: Renaissance painter
Sandro Botticelli’s multi-layer “Map of Hell,” which gave image to the horrors
described in Dante’s Inferno, the
opening chapter of his epic Divine Comedy.
Ah, but Langdon’s educated mind continues to function, despite his bewilderment;
this version of Botticelli’s masterpiece has been altered, with random letters
inserted throughout. Some sort of anagram?
But of course! And this naturally
points to another work of art — Giorgio Vasari’s “Battle of Marciano” — which
involves a trip to Venice’s St. Mark’s Square, and then to Florence’s Palazzo
Pitti, and ultimately the “Hall of 500” at the Palazzo Vecchio. Which in turn
yields a clue that points to the Baptistery, in the Piazza del Duomo, resting
place of Dante’s death mask. Which ... but you don’t really care, right?
Navigating the ongoing clues of
this maddening puzzle would be difficult enough under calm circumstances, but
of course Landon and Sienna have other worries. They’re dogged at every step
not only by squads of Florentine police, but also by:
• A group of nasty-looking thugs,
led by the relentless Christoph Bouchard (Omar Sy);
• A larger posse of (supposedly)
World Health Organization officials, supervised by the grim-faced Elizabeth
Sinskey (Sidse Babett Knudsen);
• Unspecified agents working for
a sinister “consulting group” known only as The Consortium, which operates from
a huge, ocean-bound luxury liner, and is run by the quietly ruthless Harry Sims
(Irrfan Khan); and
• The aforementioned
not-a-Carabinieri, actually a brutal female assassin named Vayentha (Ana
Ularu).
(I supposed we should be grateful
that, for once, Brown hasn’t included any Catholic/Vatican cabals in this
overcooked mess.)
The reason for all this lunacy?
Zobrist has developed an über-powerful “bio bomb,” with which he intends to
eradicate at least half the world’s population in one quick strike. Worse yet,
this whatzit is gonna go off in LESS THAN
24 HOURS!!!!!
Zobrist’s acolytes (whoever they
are) want this to take place; certain nasty parties (whoever they are) want to
deactivate the whatzit, but reserve it for their own nefarious purposes; and
actual World Health Organization officers (whoever they are) wish to destroy it. Supposedly.
I complained, back in 2009, about
how the Howard/Koepp adaptation of Brown’s Angels & Demons crammed an impossible amount of activity into the story’s
series of 60-minute deadline periods. So much movement, is such short spans of
time, clearly was beyond physical possibility; the whole exercise became stupid
on its face.
This one’s even worse.
With less than a day in which to
solve all these puzzles, while dashing hither and yon, evading multiple unknown
pursuers, knowing that the Fate Of The World hangs in the balance, Langdon
would need at least three clones to accomplish what this film demands. And such
physical and temporal limitations become even more ridiculous, when the final
clue sends everybody to the Hagia Sophia.
In Istanbul.
Oh, puh-leaze.
Hanks can’t begin to bring
credibility to any of this claptrap. He may have given some character depth to
Langdon, back in 2006’s adaptation of The
Da Vinci Code, but here he’s no more than a puppet, jerked around by an
increasingly incomprehensible plot. Hanks’ “acting” is limited to various
stages of bafflement and panic, which may suit the contrivance of Langdon’s
amnesia, but also suggests that Hanks, himself, doesn’t have the faintest idea
what’s going on, from one scene to the next.
Jones, at least, has a handle on
Sienna: resourceful, sympathetic, courageous and almost as outside-the-box
smart as Langdon. (She was a child prodigy, obsessed with puzzles. Of course.)
Jones also adds some badly needed levity, as her occasionally mocking asides
are the closest this film gets to a sense of humor.
Foster is persuasively messianic
as the doomsday-spouting Zobrist, and Ularu makes a great, grim-faced assassin.
Khan exudes Machiavellian intrigue as the mysterious Sims, and Sy’s Bouchard
looks and sounds dangerous in his own right.
Ida Darvish is a breath of fresh
air as Marta Alvarez, a credibly human — and wholly ordinary — museum director at the Piazza del Duomo.
Howard’s film may fail as a
suspense thriller, but it functions superbly as a travelogue, and production
designer Peter Wenham has fun with some of the elaborately fictitious sets,
most notably the expansive “cistern symphony hall” where the story’s climax
takes place. That’s about the best that can be said.
I note that Brown (thus far) has
two more books in his Robert Langdon series, The Lost Symbol and Origin.
Is it asking too much, that we be spared big-screen adaptations?
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